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The Dirt On the David

It's not easy being the world's most famous statue. Michelangelo's ''David'' has managed to rouse passions and provoke controversy ever since 1504, when unruly Florentines greeted its unveiling with a hail of stones. Since then it has been the target of rioters who hurled a bench at it in 1527, breaking the left arm in three pieces, and of an envious artist named Piero Cannata who took a hammer to it in 1991, demolishing one of its toes. Few masterpieces of Western art have been on the receiving end of so many projectiles.

Michelangelo's nude giant has also been the victim of guardians of public morality who, in the middle of the 16th century, insisted on the addition of a metal loincloth made of 28 fig leaves -- a prudishness repeated in 1995, when religious authorities in Jerusalem declined Florence's gift of a full-scale replica of ''David'' unless its privates were similarly concealed.

Given this turbulent history, and given the notoriety of several recent art conservation projects in Italy, the newest dispute concerning ''David'' -- should it be cleaned with high-tech solvent or by more traditional means? -- hardly comes as a surprise. The controversy has filled European newspapers this summer, giving editors a welcome respite from stories about the European Union and its new Constitution.

The attention is also understandable given that the statue was last cleaned in 1843, when a restorer named Aristodemo Costoli bathed it in hydrochloric acid. Thankfully, art restoration has progressed substantially since Costoli's day. It is now a highly technical enterprise drawing on cutting-edge advances in chemistry, biology and even space science. The DNA of a painting's contaminants can be isolated in the laboratory, after which infra-red lasers or, in some cases, special enzymes are enlisted to remove them.

Statues and monuments are treated to sonar surveys and analyzed by miniature television cameras inserted through bore-holes; structural deficiencies in the work are then shored up with a biological mortar created from a carbonate-generating bacterium. A technique developed by NASA for testing equipment on the space shuttles has even found its way into the restorers' arsenal. Damaged or dirty paintings are zapped with atomic oxygen, which then reacts with the hydrocarbon atoms of their pollutants, deftly separating them from the canvas. This approach recently proved successful in removing the lipstick with which an insouciant admirer embellished a painting in the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh.

In sharp contrast, the approach for cleaning ''David,'' when it was announced last fall, seemed surprisingly low-tech: Agnese Parronchi, the chief restorer, was to emerge from the wings of the Galleria dell'Accademia at closing time and begin gently scrubbing at the marble with an assortment of badger-hair brushes, cotton swabs and rubber erasers before giving the statue a rubdown with a chamois cloth. Although newspapers around Europe reported that ''David'' was being given a bath, Ms. Parronchi, in fact, planned to use very little water, believing it would remove not only dirt but also the protective coating of oil applied by Michelangelo himself.

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But just as she was about to start work, controversy, predictably, reared its ugly head. Ms. Parronchi resigned her position in April after a bitter dispute with her superior, Franca Falletti, director of works at the Accademia. Some British newspapers have portrayed the quarrel, relishingly, as little more than two ambitious women squabbling over a man. As in all restorations, however, serious issues are at stake. Ms. Parronchi told a British newspaper that Ms. Falletti, an art historian, favors more technological methods because they seem more impressive. Ms. Falletti countered by accusing Ms. Parronchi of possessing a horror of all that is modern -- in this case, of the chemical-soaked poultices with which Ms. Falletti and the others at the Accademia wish to clean the statue.

The relative failure of such a high-profile project as the 20-year campaign to restore Leonardo's ''Last Supper'' should warn us about both the seductive promises of science and the zealous interventions of the restoration industry. At a time when the more venturesome solutions to conservation problems regularly steal the headlines, Ms. Parronchi's old-fashioned method might come across as a throwback to the days when Greek wine and stale bread were the restorers supplies of choice for scrubbing dirty frescoes. But her badger-hair brush also happens to be highly effective and perfectly safe. Although Ms. Falletti has speculated that Ms. Parronchi's humble tools could damage the statue, her previous undertakings -- most notably her work on the Medici tombs carved by Michelangelo for the New Sacristy in San Lorenzo in Florence -- underscore the soundness of her methods.

Ms. Parronchi also seems to have valid reasons for her reluctance to subject ''David'' to newfangled restoration techniques. She has argued that the compresses favored by Ms. Falletti will leave untouched the pockets of grime in the statue's many pits and grooves, subtly diminishing its beauty. These concerns are shared by James Beck, a Columbia University art historian and Michelangelo expert who had to fend off libel claims in the Italian courts after criticizing what he regarded as the insensitive cleaning of a 15th-century tomb in Lucca.

With Ms. Parronchi gone, the Accademia has hired a new restorer. Work will resume sometime in the fall, chemical compresses at the ready. Though it would have been better served by Ms. Parronchi's swabs and brushes, ''David'' will no doubt come through this latest rumpus. After all, any statue that survived Costoli's acid bath and Mr. Cannata's hammer blow can probably survive almost anything. But in the meantime we are left to contemplate a disquieting situation in which a beloved masterpiece is becoming a victim of art-world politics. You might call it a restoration tragedy.

Ross King is author of ''Brunelleschi's Dome: How a Renaissance Genius Reinvented Architecture.''